Blue Dots

Third announcement

Dear colleague,

Thank you for having expressed your interest into the Blue Dots initiative. The response to the initial announcement has been enthousiastic (this list contains more than 190 names) and this only shows that the time is ripe for such a community effort to elaborate a strategy towards the detection and characterization of habitable exoplanets. There is now an (almost final) list of coordinators (see below), who will constitute their expert group over the next few weeks — feel free to contact the ones closest to your theme(s) when you need to.

What’s going up next? We want to collect inputs about possible actions (space missions, ground based instruments, or other types of projects) that could be undertaken for the realization of the Blue Dots goal. There will be a call for proposals before the summer about this. We will process this information and integrate it into a road map between this autumn and the summer of 2009. An international conference (tentatively scheduled for 14-18 September 2009, location TBD) will be held to present and discuss the results. We hope therefore to be able to present a consolidated approach during the next round of ESA’s Cosmic Vision process, planned for 2010.

Best regards,

Vincent Coudé du Foresto for the Blue Dots team

List of expert groups coordinators (replace § by @ in the email addresses):

Planetary characterization:
- Targets and their environments: Ignasi Ribas (iribas§ieec.uab.es)
- Formation and evolution of planetary systems: Hans Zinnecker (hzinnecker§aip.de)
- Modelling habitable planets: Franck Selsis (franck.selsis§obs.u-bordeaux1.fr)
- Habitability criteria: Charles Cockell (C.S.Cockell§open.ac.uk)
- Observations of planetary atmospheres: Giovanna Tinetti (ucapgti§ucl.ac.uk)

Detection techniques:
- Radial velocity: Nuno Santos (nuno§astro.up.pt)
- Single aperture imaging: Anthony Boccaletti (anthony.boccaletti§obspm.fr)
- Multiple aperture imaging: Marc Ollivier (marc.ollivier§ias.u-psud.fr)
- Microlensing: Jean-Philippe Beaulieu (beaulieu§iap.fr)
- Astrometry: Damien Segransan (Damien.Segransan§obs.unige.ch)
- Transits: Alessandro Sozzeti (sozzetti§oato.inaf.it)

Others:
- Public outreach and education: Ewa Szuszkiewicz (szusz§univ.szczecin.pl)
- European networking and funding search: Helmut Lammer (helmut.lammer§oeaw.ac.at)
- Interface with the industry: Christoph Keller (C.U.Keller§astro.uu.nl)

- ESO contact point: Gerard van Belle (gerard.van.belle§eso.org)
- JPL’s ExoPlanet Exploration Program representative: Chas Beichman (chas§pop.jpl.nasa.gov)
- JAXA contact point: Hiroshi Shibai (shibai§nagoya-u.jp)
- Russia / Eastern Europe contact point: Maxim Khodachenko (maxim.khodachenko§oeaw.ac.at)
- Contact point for India: Abhijit Chakraborty
- Contact point for China: TBD

Monday 31 March 2008 by Vincent Coudé du Foresto